


Freaks Of A Feather

by contraryGreymalkin



Series: Tales From The Vantas Fairybook [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ashen Romance | Auspistice, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-09
Updated: 2013-05-09
Packaged: 2017-12-10 21:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/790468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/contraryGreymalkin/pseuds/contraryGreymalkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being one of a kind doesn't mean you have to be alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freaks Of A Feather

**Author's Note:**

> Another fairytale fic: The Ugly Duckling + the colour pink = a harder prompt than expected, but here we are. Again, I'm not sure whether warnings actually apply here - do detailed inner musings count as "depiction"? - so once again, I'm erring on the side of caution.

He's grown up graceful, for a lowblood, and you know you shouldn't think like that, it's even something you'd slap Eridan for saying, but nevertheless it's true. You'd glimpsed him - grub-him, that is - in the lab just before the Reckoning, all clumsy wriggler legs and snapping teeth and a bad temper that would never ever fade, as if he knew already what kind of life lay ahead of him, and you think you'd have known even then, even if that was the first time you'd ever laid your eyes on Karkat Vantas, that he wasn't going to be like the others.

Though you still would have been dead wrong about all the details.

 

She's been looking at you differently lately, as though she's going to lash out and snap your spine any second, and leave you bleeding on the ground while she runs off to glub with Equius about protocol and or some other shit that only highbloods care about.

As though she's figured out you really _are_ just a filthy mutant not worth the effort paradox space put into making you.

You wonder, were your places reversed, if you'd spare Feferi Peixes any sympathy. After all, with her (inexplicably less annoying) ancestor gone, she's one of a kind too.

 

Dirk told you a story once, when you were feeling particularly miserable about your fragile pink carapace and the weird fur sprouting from your head, about a duckling who wasn't a duckling, and you knew it was meant to cheer you up. It didn't work, not even when you got old enough to watch movies that weren't animated, and seeing other humans on the screen, walking and talking and moving and laughing, made you feel a little better about your skin and hair and voice and the shape of your elbows. It didn't work, because not one of them had eyes like yours.

Now you're watching Karkat and Feferi fight over the placement of a can, all claws and teeth and flying fur, a pair of fragile-looking aliens who could, either one of them, break your ribs with a well-placed elbowstrike, and it hits you that when their eye colours come in, raging scarlet and livid fuschia, you could go right in the middle with your ridic pink and all be mutant freaks together.

...maybe you should jump in, actually, Fef's foot just landed dangerously close to the town hall and someone had better stop them before one of them falls on the light of democracy, and their quarrel is so dumb and pointless because the Mayor's not even here for them to impress.

 

There's a point in every fight where how it started ceases to matter, and occasionally - like now - that also goes for the end. What you're saying is, it really doesn't matter just _how_ Lalonde Senior - well, sort of Senior, fuck, you hate time travel and parallel universes - managed to position herself straddling Peixes on the floor, one hand grabbing firmly at her left horn and the other pushing your face into the carpet. Just that that's the awkward and provocative position the three of you are currently stuck in, and you're weirdly reluctant to put up any kind of fight, and the douchelicker who sits in the back of your pan and snarks at you every time you fuck up is groaning something about not falling for _another_ goddamn human.

Then Roxy growls like an angry cougar and says, "Now I've got a story to tell you d-bags, an' you both are gonna _listen_ , right?"

And all you can do is spit out a muffled "Fine", and when she lets you up, you see Feferi has the same look you do, the same confused embarrassment as though you've been dragged before a principal neither of you even fucking knew your schoolhive _had_.

"Good," your auspistice smirks, and you're glad she knows what she's doing, because she's the only one in this room who does. "Cos it's one you both need to hear, but first I got a question for you - did your planet have ducks?"


End file.
